On Mondays during the NHL lockout, Sporting News will present radical—and, in most cases improbable—proposals designed to get the league back on track and ensure its long-term health. The 10th in that series: using the transfer system in use by global soccer.

It was toward the end of his first press conference on Thursday—the one before the one—when NHLPA executive director Donald Fehr belted out one of his classics. You know the words by now, so sing along.

“What I had hoped was that we would be able to have a process which would break the ‘lock out first, and ask questions later’ method of operations which seems to have infected hockey, basketball and football,” Fehr said. “I would hope that when this agreement is eventually concluded … that there would be something that grows out of this experience which would have a therapeutic effect to break that cycle.”

Fehr should know as well as anybody that the lockout cycle is not going anywhere so long as owners and players are arguing over how to split league revenues in a percentage-based system. Having scuttled the 1994 World Series to prevent such a system from being implemented in Major League Baseball, and having seen the labor peace and piles of money for everyone in that sport ever since, Fehr also knows as well as anybody that short-term pain can be worthwhile for long-term gain.

Likewise, the NHL knows, after losing the 2004-05 season to labor strife and making sweeping changes to the way it does business, that a fresh start can be beneficial.

What both the NHLPA and NHL should recognize is that sweeping change, and an end to the lockout cycle, need not require the cancellation of another season, even though that was the way the most trusted voice in the hockey media, TSN’s Bob McKenzie, put it in October.

“It’s been widely reported that if the NHL cancels the season, Fehr and the NHLPA may counter by putting the salary cap back on the table, which of course would lead to the NHL putting guaranteed contracts on the table and, well, you get the idea,” McKenzie wrote. “We’d be going into (an) apocalyptic nightmare that would virtually guarantee we’d be in much the same place a year from now (than) we currently find ourselves.”

The basis for that scenario being an “apocalyptic nightmare” is the idea that non-guaranteed contracts are anathema to the NHLPA, which is absolutely true. That does not mean it has to be true, and here is how to make it not be true:

1. NHLPA takes salary cap off the table.

2. NHL responds by saying, “Oh yeah? How about from now on, your contracts aren’t guaranteed?”

Say the Montreal Canadiens want to get out from under the final two years and $9 million on Scott Gomez’s contract. Let them do it. Who is going to complain other than Gomez, who has made $23.5 million over the past three seasons in Montreal, and scored 21 goals?

But if teams can break contracts just because they aren’t getting fair value, so can players. David Desharnais had 60 points in a breakout 2011-12 season, but his contract for 2012-13 is only worth $950,000. Why shouldn’t Desharnais be allowed to negotiate new terms with the Canadiens, or find another team that will pay him market value?

If Desharnais’ step forward last season proves to be a fluke, no worries, his new contract is non-guaranteed. If he winds up being a star, he will be paid like one.

Setting up a free-for-all system in which anyone on either side of a contract can walk away from their obligations at any time would lead to chaos, so some restraints would have to be included, and the NHL and NHLPA would have a chance to implement changes that would be financially beneficial on a long-term basis.

Global soccer already has a successful model in place with its system of transfer fees, the lion’s share of which go to the club losing a player, with cuts for agents and the players themselves. In the NHL, transfer fees could be used not only to compensate teams for losing in-demand players, but to fund the revenue-sharing pool as well. If, for example, the Canucks decided to sell Roberto Luongo to the Maple Leafs, money would go to Vancouver, to Luongo, and to the revenue-sharing system. In this way, Toronto actually would be getting something for its continued propping up of the NHL’s weaker sisters, rather than just the good feeling that comes from giving to charity.

The Leafs win by getting Luongo and hanging on to their top prospects, the Canucks win by getting a pile of transfer-fee money that they can turn into better players than they would have gotten in a trade, Luongo wins by getting a cut of the transfer fee and a new contract in Toronto, and the rest of the NHL wins by getting more money pumped into the system.

Beyond simply removing percentages of hockey-related revenue from future CBA discussions, adopting a new way of doing things would help to avoid another big problem for the NHL and NHLPA. Every summer, there is a mad rush to spend obscene amounts of money on free agents, whose value is determined only by who happens to be a free agent that year, and which teams have money to spend. That’s how you wind up with a world in which Zach Parise and Ryan Suter are among the highest-paid players in hockey. They are excellent players, sure, but got substantially bigger contracts this summer because of the oldest market factors in the world, supply and demand.

By making all players, or at least players with a certain level of NHL experience, available in a transfer system, there would be a greater supply of players available in any given year. By removing the salary cap to make this happen, smaller-market teams would have a greater opportunity to benefit from the largesse of the big clubs.

There are other points and restrictions on such a system that both the NHL and NHLPA would want (things like age, experience, eligibility and frequency of players using the system), and they would be free to negotiate those terms. There are always kinks to work out. But that surely beats a system that so far has been shown, across sports, to be a failure when it comes to what fans care about most: seeing actual games.